Ashley F. Miller is a writer, activist, and communications scholar from South Carolina, who has worked for LGBT, secular, and women’s rights for over a decade. She is one of the leading young people in the secular movement, speaking regularly at schools and conferences across the country about feminism and communications. Her writing was recently featured in the best-selling Women's Studies text, Women's Voices, Feminist Visions, alongside writers like Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, and Jessica Valenti.

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A reader asked why I didn't have one of these, so I figured out how to make one and it exists. They were kind enough to give me a donation, I was very surprised! So, if there is anyone else out there who was lamenting that this capability did not exist, it exists now, but please, do not feel obligated. Thank you for reading!

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Read the whole thing if you want to understand my rage. Here’s the paragraph that made me stabby:

Medical diagnoses are real. When you learn you have pneumonia, diabetes or even cancer, you quickly discover that there are potential remedies. There are scientific tests and studies to diagnose the disease and to evaluate its treatment. Medical diagnoses don’t demean your mind and your soul, they describe your bodily impairments.

1) His complaint that there are no positive psychiatric diagnoses. May I ask when the last time someone was diagnosed with a most excellent spleen? People usually go to doctors because they have a perceived lower quality of life, not for validation. They get diagnosed when the doctor sees something wrong. Or are people rampantly being diagnosed with good cholesterol and no one’s telling me?

2) A diagnosis gives you something positive in that it allows you to work towards a specific goal. “I have ADD, therefore I need to take particular care to learn patience and find ways of learning that are hands on and interesting.” Instead of being like oh my life sucks and there’s nothing I can do about it you can instead be like, hey here’s what’s been wrong with me all this time and there’s something I can do about it.

3) If someone’s life sucks and getting a diagnosis is going to get them medication that will make it suck less, that’s a positive. Not everyone can look at life with sunshine and roses and hugs in their hearts, and it’s absolutely shitty of that guy to imply that people’s real problem is that they’re just not trying hard enough to face life with warm fuzzies and empathy.

4) By his definition, all drugs are toxins because the point of a drug is to try to chemically alter the body to improve symptoms. Damn those asthmatics and their toxic inhalers, how dare they want to live. Damn those depressives with their anti-depressants, how dare they want to stop being suicidal. How dare anyone take any of that voodoo medication that’s been carefully studied in clinical trials to help the symptoms these people have? Everyone knows if you treat a headache, all you are is that symptom, not some sort of human being who had a headache that needed some ibuprofen.

5) He’s just furthering the bullshit argument that psychiatric problems aren’t as “real” as other health problems. His worry that someone might be one-dimensionalized by a diagnosis is because people like him keep saying that the only important thing about a person who has been diagnosed bipolar is that they’re bipolar. As though getting a mental condition under control is going to make someone less able to live normally because they have to recognize they have issues. Yes, let’s let all the schizophrenics and autistic kids have terrible lives, but at least no one will call them schizophrenic or autistic.